News

November 23, 2009

Minera IRL Plans To Be Producing 200,000 Ounces Of Gold Per Year By 2014

By Alastair Ford

“We’re really busy”, says Courtney Chamberlain of Minera IRL, on the phone from his office in Peru. He’s just got time to give Minesite a quick update before he heads up to the hills to visit his company’s Corihuarmi gold mine, which was the scene of an attempted robbery some weeks ago, but which, more significantly, was the scene of a nice looking upgrade to reserves earlier in the year. “We went into this year with less than 100,000 ounces in reserve”, Courtney says, “but with a good result at Corihuarmi, we’ve now got 145,000 ounces”. What’s more, what with the various wheeling and dealing that Courtney’s been getting up to, not to mention development work on Minera IRL’s other projects, overall resources have rocketed to 1.7 million ounces.

For a company founded on an operation as small-scale as Corihuarmi is, this is not bad going. It’s helpful, of course, that the gold price is soaring away, to heights that were unimaginable just a few short years ago. But the impact on Minera’s production numbers, or more specifically margins, has been very welcome indeed. The company produced 7,850 ounces of gold during the third quarter of 2009, taking the total for the year up to 22,753 ounces. The latest quarter was, says Courtney, the best...